With the recent development of technology in anticancer immunotherapy, a wide variety of remedies have been developed and various therapeutic methods devised. However, the cellular immunity in relation to immunotherapy in humans has not yet been completely elucidated.
The inventor has made analysis and comparison to examine how effective and ineffective cases differ or what the immune state in normal healthy persons without past histories of malignant neoplasms like cancers or sarcomas is like, taking, as examples, patients with metastatic renal cancer who had undergone an aggressive interferon-alpha (.alpha.-IFN) treatment to continuously monitor the kinetics of activated suppression inducer/helper, helper and suppression inducer T lymphocytes, NK cell, OKIa1 positive lymphocyte and so on.
As a result, it has been found that by the multiple regression analysis (MRA), which is one of multivariate data analyses, for the correlation of monocyte with helper and activated suppression inducer/helper T lymphocytes, new and important findings in respect of cellular immunity, especially cancer immunokinetics, are obtained.
More specifically, it has now been found that the above-mentioned analysis renders it possible to estimate the function of autologous tumor antigen recognition mechanism (ATARM), the possibility of progress from carcinogenesis to nosogenesis and the presence, state and details of malignant neoplasm and is accordingly useful for the detection of cancers, tumors etc. and can be utilized as indices for the efficacy of their treatments.
As for activated suppression inducer/helper, helper and suppression inducer T lymphocytes, NK cell and OKIa1 positive lymphocyte, these lymphocytes have only been measured individually and the mutual relationships among them have never been examined to date. That is to say, it is the real state of things that the significance of the results of such measurement has never been made clear and that immunokinetics have never been grasped on the basis of such results.
The object of this invention is to provide a method of measuring immunokinetics, which permits immunokinetics of cellular immunity, especially cancer immunity, to be grasped in a straightforward manner, and further can serve as an index for the diagnosis, treatment, prognosis etc. of different diseases, in particular autoimmune diseases like bronchial asthma, atopic dermatitis etc. hereditary gene diseases causing abnormal immune states, immune from organ transplantation, viral diseases affecting cellular immunity like serum hepatitis, cancer etc.